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A scribal edition of Piers Plowman C in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 293
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Wood, Sarah (2019) A scribal edition of Piers Plowman C in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 293. Scriptorium, 72 . pp. 93-106. ISSN 0036-9772.
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Abstract
This essay examines the unique form of the final, «C» version of Piers Plowman contained in the fifteenth-century manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 293. The manuscript is one of several listed by the editors of the standard critical edition of Piers Plowman as characterized by serious textual deficiencies, though no other copy contains the same textual gaps found here. The material form and decoration of the manuscript make this a particularly modest presentation of the poem, even by the standards of the generally minimally-decorated manuscripts of Langland’s work. It lacks the higher grades of decoration and the extensive annotation found in some better-known copies of Piers. Despite its humble physical form, however, the manuscript is of significant potential interest for its four major omissions of text. Two of these textual lacunae may be ascribed to commonplace accidents that probably occurred during the production of the present copy. Two are more likely to have occurred in an earlier exemplar, and I argue that they may reflect a deliberate scribal redaction of the poem, a form of the text that eliminates certain aspects of Langland’s work in order to bring others into greater prominence. The (deliberate) gaps in the Corpus text make it an important witness to the various, sometimes eccentric, forms that the poem took in the years following its original composition.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Scriptorium | ||||||||
Publisher: | Centre d'Etude des Manuscrits | ||||||||
ISSN: | 0036-9772 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 2019 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 72 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 93-106 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 19 March 2018 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 29 May 2019 | ||||||||
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